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Sun, 01 Mar 2015 02:39:41 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1Eyeo: Unveiling the Magic of Datahttps://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/eyeo-unveiling-the-magic-of-data/
https://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/eyeo-unveiling-the-magic-of-data/#commentsMon, 24 Jun 2013 19:32:44 +0000http://www.knewton.com/?p=62122Read more]]>Earlier this month I was lucky enough to attend Eyeo Festival, a conference where the ideas of data, interaction, and art are explored together as a whole.

It’s called a conference, but it doesn’t feel much like one. I would say it feels more like a celebration. A celebration for the community of dataists, coders, designers, and artists that are working at this intersection. A celebration at which to marvel at the magic and transformative power of data.

At Knewton, I work as the data storyteller. I spend most of my time making sense of large sets of complex educational and technical data, finding stories, and exploring the most effective way to communicate them truthfully. You can imagine how Eyeo was an incomparable opportunity to get inspired.

Over four days of talks and presentations, scientific references were indistinguishably entangled with artistic ones. This combined approach to information, creative as much as analytical, was simply taken for granted. It did not require an explanation for the attendees, whose nature is to seek meaning by combining realms of knowledge. Just as an example, designer Giorgia Lupi, who runs a data visualization studio in Milan, quoted H.D. Thoreau to illustrate her talk. On the same stage a day later, Memo Atkins, a Turkish installation artist based in London, quoted Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan.

This year’s Eyeo also saw a big effort to explore the possibilities for social good behind data visualization and analysis. Some speakers, like TacticalTech’s Maya Ganesh or DataKind’s Jake Porway, presented projects that pushed for human and civil rights advocacy, with data as a primary material.

These socially involved speakers conveyed the idea of a required responsibility when approaching data that has an effect on society. Respecting the variety of potential perspectives and being truthful to the analysis are vital. This was illustrated by Columbia’s SIDL Lowe and Kurgan, who proposed to explore data by understanding it as an essential part of a societal feedback loop.

Others like Ben Fry, co-creator of Processing, represented a more investigative approach to visualization. In particular, he went over the process behind a piece on the political structure in China. Not only was the result beautiful, but it represented one of the best examples of the way data journalism is finding its own language to tell stories, a language capable of unprecedented insight into the complexity of our societies.

His colleague in the creation of Processing, Casey Reas, focused on artistic and inspirational uses of software. His talk reviewed the history of computational art and explored how designing tools for creation (in our case software, algorithms, electronics) can help creativity thrive.

Data artists are the researchers of the experience of data, of how we communicate, share and interact with technology and its trails. Eyeo was a reminder to me of how technological innovation is strongly linked with the quest for new languages in storytelling, and how only through the experimentation we can drive transformative ideas.

One of the most beautiful things about Eyeo is how brand-free it feels. The organizer’s goal seems to be to agglomerate as many intelligent projects as possible. It is a space for exploration and experimentation, and as sometimes happens with kids, it seems to thrive when left alone to its curiosity.

At Eyeo, you sometimes forget to remind yourself how much everything you witness seems to belong to the realm of magic. But beyond the awe, there was something else that excited me that I at first had troubling verbalizing. Something that could help me understand the vibrancy of the community gathered by the event, the celebration — something I suspected had to do with education.

On the second night, while waiting for everybody to sit for the last talk, I was chatting with Ben, a filmmaker interested in the scalability of data-based storytelling, and Mark, a designer, on what education would look like in a few years.

That casual conversation sparked it. What had been stirring me was the approach to learning that you could breathe at Eyeo, an approach based on curiosity, on play, on experimenting. In five days, I talked to dozens of people, all of them with admirable careers. Enlightening data investigative work, inspiring installations, beautiful pieces. But I didn’t meet a single person who didn’t consider herself to be learning.

Every single one of the attendees was engaged in an active quest to find her own perspective, her own language, to explore and enhance the experience of data. The only way to do that is if you consider your only job to be learning. Learning as the inevitable result of curiosity, as the road to finding new ways to telling the story of now.

]]>https://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/eyeo-unveiling-the-magic-of-data/feed/0How Learning Analytics Can Empower Teachers and Encourage Critical Thoughthttps://www.knewton.com/blog/teacher-tools/how-learning-analytics-can-empower-teachers-and-encourage-critical-thought/
https://www.knewton.com/blog/teacher-tools/how-learning-analytics-can-empower-teachers-and-encourage-critical-thought/#commentsWed, 30 May 2012 14:25:53 +0000http://www.knewton.com/?p=46495Read more]]>When we talk about the ongoing revolution in education, we tend to focus on students: how their experience is changing, how to personalize learning, how to make the classroom a more engaging and effective place. Sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to another large group (7 million people in the US alone) who think about these issues every day: teachers.

Last March, Metlife released the Survey of the American Teacher, which has been published since 1984. The study was conducted in over 1000 schools across the US, and provides an interesting snapshot on teachers’ perceptions of their own role in the American education ecosystem.

The conclusion seems clear: teachers’ perception of the quality of their jobs has been decreasing in the last few years.

This is a complex issue; no one party is to blame. Some of the time trends are uncertain (for example, in 2006, 26% of teachers said they were likely to leave the profession). The shadow of the current economic environment may have had an effect on teachers’ responses, or perhaps changes in the education world are eroding their confidence. Whatever the reasons, our society is not succeeding in creating an environment in which all teachers feel satisfied, valued, and secure in their jobs.

Teachers are also feeling more pessimistic about student engagement, a perception associated with budget cuts. Many teachers report that education resources and facilities have declined in quality. Seventy-seven percent of teachers feel they are being treated as professionals by their community — a fairly high percentage, but one that has declined over the years. This measurement has historically been closely correlated with teachers’ perceptions of job security and satisfaction, which have also decreased.

As other successful educational systems in the world (such as Finland) have shown, teachers’ perceptions of their own roles and their passion about their profession has a huge influence on students’ educational outcomes. And it’s not about money. A majority of teachers feel they are being paid fairly and feel engaged in their communities.

As the educational landscape changes, so will teachers’ needs and job responsibilities. We need to ensure that teachers have the tools they need to best serve students in this new educational environment.

The contribution of educational technology: learning analytics

Our society as whole, and policymakers in particular, should be paying close attention to these results. But what can we, the educational technology community, do to put teachers back in a leading role in this educational revolution? One of the innovations in education I’m most excited about is the field of learning analytics.

The 2012 Horizon Report defines learning analytics as “the interpretation of a wide range of data produced by and gathered on behalf of students in order to assess academic progress, predict future performance and spot potential issues. […] The goal of learning analytics is to enable teachers and schools to tailor educational opportunities to each student’s level of need and ability in close-to-real time.”

If students are to change and adapt to a new way of learning (in consonance with the way they live, as Ken recently wrote), we need teachers to be ahead of that change. What we are seeing now is a revolution in the wealth of information we’re gathering about each student.

With the right analytical tools, teachers will have a much more accurate picture of where each student stands in relation to her individual needs, capacities, and interests, as well as within her group of peers. This is what learning analytics is about: insight and context. It is about teachers gaining access to new, meaningful information about their students’ progress.

At the same time, learning analytics should not be seen as taking over the teaching experience. Analytical tools are unlikely to capture subtler aspects of the benefits of a classroom experience, such as motivation, discovering new interests, or engaging with a community. Learning analytics will serve a specific function for teachers, helping them detect students’ needs more quickly so that they can make informed decisions on how to most effectively serve them.

Some will argue that it’s not fair to say that learning analytics are a true innovation. At some level, they’re right. Teachers and administrators have been keeping track of their students’ educational outcomes and behavior for a very long time: attendance records, grades, observations, scores, etc. This is the reason tests exist: to provide a measure of students’ knowledge and progress. However, over the years, tests have come to serve a purpose they were never meant to: they’ve become the object of learning, rather than the method by which to assess it.

Now, with the amount of data gathered per student increasing by several orders of magnitude, analytical tools are likely to gain a much more important role in the classroom. These more powerful analytics will lessen the burden on tests to assess learning, and in doing so, allow critical thinking and knowledge gain to become the primary goals of education once again.

In this new landscape, teachers might be relied on less to transmit knowledge. Instead, they will likely regain a role of a more Socratic nature: guidance through knowledge. The teacher will be responsible for helping to produce well-rounded, inquisitive, and thoughtful citizens, rather than fact receptacles. Teaching will become much more about developing critical thinking tools and designing collaborative interactions and creative environments, and less about a simple transmission of content.

As analytical tools develop and are adopted, it is inevitable that issues will arise. What’s the privacy policy? Who should have access to what? Is it possible for an instructor to have too much information? Are there any dangers that will distort the goals of teaching? Of learning?

In a certain light, learning analytics could do for education what business intelligence is doing for business. Today, it seems unthinkable to run a business without these tools. But if we’re not talking products, but citizens, the need to make this an effective and ethical transition in every step is even more dramatic. The goal of the adoption of learning analytics should be to escape the “one-size-fits-all” framework and replace it with a much more personalized view of each individual. In this way, teachers will be able to develop a climate of critical awareness, creativity, and collaboration.

]]>https://www.knewton.com/blog/teacher-tools/how-learning-analytics-can-empower-teachers-and-encourage-critical-thought/feed/1Knewton Reads: “The Information” and Data Visualizationhttps://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/book-review-the-information/
https://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/book-review-the-information/#commentsMon, 16 Apr 2012 14:00:58 +0000http://www.knewton.com/?p=42506Read more]]>Last month, we started a book club at Knewton to jumpstart discussion on tech, education, and management ideas related to our work. Every month the whole company is invited to nominate and vote for a relevant book. “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” by James Gleick was our winner for the month of April. The book covers the history of information — from the invention of scripts and alphabets to the Morse code and the arrival of the Information Age. We’ll post a few reviews of each book on our blog each month; stay tuned for more reviews of “The Information” in the weeks to come!

In “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,” James Gleick explores some of the most groundbreaking scientific revolutions in history through the lens of the concept of “information.” The first anecdotes depict English anthropologists investigating the mechanism behind drum talk, a communication system based on drumming used by certain tribes in central Africa. It is a simple and brilliantly clear way to introduce the concept of information. Throughout the book, whether he’s writing about Ada Byron or Samuel Morse, Gleick builds on this theme like a composer at work on a grand symphony.

Gleick argues that the flood of information we have today will transform every single field in science and business. For example, Gleick describes the discovery of an informational basis for the genetic revolution, which turned biological sciences into strong information sciences, with codes and instructions defining the way we think about life and the role of individual beings in evolution. Later in the book, we learn about the birth of the information-based sibling of psychology–cognitive science–which approaches the understanding of the mind through information.

“The Information” is open to interpretation. One could argue that the book does not question the vision of a completely data-mined society. However, I think Gleick has a more nuanced aim in mind. “The Information” reminds us of the past, so we can understand the future in a broader context and be fully cognizant of the dangers, wonders, and possibilities of our age.

The third and final part of the book–the “flood” part–deals with the current work being done in the world of information: finding patterns, understanding them, and communicating them effectively. Gleick describes how there is a newfound need for additional layers of symbolic framework in order to make sense of the information rushing towards us. In other words, there is an increasing need to rapidly pack and unpack information as “the flood” shapes our society, our businesses, and the very foundations of our knowledge.

Data visualization is part of that abstraction. First of all, there is a need for understanding and describing the patterns behind data. Secondly, it seems natural to describe those patterns through visual relationships rather than linguistic ones. Thus I predict a much greater emphasis on the visual going forward (hence the burst of interest in infographics and interactive visualizations). To some extent, we need the visual to make sense of the data flood; we’ve entered an entirely new plane of reality where we’ll need to explore new ways to communicate the knowledge we possess. At the same time, we’ll continually need to draw ourselves back from the brink of total abstraction–back to the limitations of words and physical experience itself, so that we stay grounded enough to understand the tangible reality of the symbols that reflect that reality.

]]>https://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/book-review-the-information/feed/0Data Storytime: The Best Readers Prefer Fictionhttps://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/data-storytime-the-best-readers-prefer-fiction/
https://www.knewton.com/blog/knerds/data-storytime-the-best-readers-prefer-fiction/#commentsMon, 09 Apr 2012 14:35:25 +0000http://www.knewton.com/?p=41200Read more]]>I work as a data storyteller at Knewton. This means I look at data coming from different origins with an inquisitive attitude and explore the narrative in it through statistical analysis. The goal is to find a story in the data that is informative and useful and that will help people make effective decisions.

For a data storyteller, any new source of data is a reason for excitement. If that source of data relates to a social field, even better. The universe of educational data that Knewton deals with certainly fits into that category.

The world of education is connected with pretty much every other aspect of our society. In order to fully understand education, we need to understand the influences that exist on and from society, as well the processes involved in learning at an individual level.

This will be the first in a series of posts contrasting different views of education and the evidence these interpretations are based on. The intention is to use to data to explore the stories inherent in education: stories about learning and development, about policy and society, about technology and anything other aspect of our world that can give us insight into what is also happening when people learn stuff.

What you read tells us about how you read

The PISA test has become the international reference for assessing educational outcomes across the world. Every three years since the year 2000, students from 66 countries have taken reading, math, and science tests.

In the last PISA reading literacy test, in 2009, U.S. 15-year-olds scored 500/700, ranking 17th and falling in the average range among the groups of participants. The countries with the top three scores on the test were South Korea, Finland, and Canada.

The test also digs into students’ interests and habits in order to help policy-makers improve as many aspects of the educational ecosystem as possible.

Not surprisingly, the results show that students who read for their own enjoyment tend to have stronger reading skills than those who do not read for pleasure. More specifically, those who read fiction for pleasure are very likely to be good readers. Reading non-fiction and comic books don’t seem to be that closely associated with skillful reading. Reading these for pleasure is associated with lower-than-average scores in the U.S. as well as most other countries — but it is still better than not reading at all.

This makes me wonder what we would find in a similar study involving internet use. While having access to technology is very likely to boost technological literacy, it is less clear how technology use interacts with learning in terms of reading or logical thinking skills. There are way too many uses of the internet (including a significant number of possibly counterproductive uses) to draw any conclusions on how it affects education in general.

Technology has the potential to transform education for the better in ways that we’re only now starting to imagine. But simple access to technologies does not guarantee a productive and creative use of them. As such, the technologically driven transformation of education needs to be a deeply thoughtful process.